Dudley wrote:
I'm not convinced that good people "shopping around" for a "good country" is going to work, or end well.
Totally.
Portugal, for example, was a lot more affordable and less crowded in the '90s and '00s, before so many people caught on. Lisbon is still an incredibly charming city, but there's a hectic and internationalized quality to the immediate center that you never used to experience. This is even more apparent to me in Porto b/c the core is much more compact, and it once had a seductively rough-around-the-edges vibe that you never found in Lisbon. Ironically, making both cities more like everywhere else than they once were. Plus, so many Portuguese can no longer afford to live anywhere w/in spitting distance of their own centers. As someone who's been to Portugal five times, we kept hearing this again and again post-pandemic. And personally, I don't wanna live in a place full of overpriced coffee shops teeming w/digital nomads, even though a handful of such people often make for agreeable enough company and variety. But it tends to feel samey.
This also holds true for cities such as Barcelona, Amsterdam, Dubrovnik...
That said, complaining about it to death is also a huge failure of imagination. There's a whole lot of Portugal (and Spain, and Holland, and Croatia) and even neighborhoods in Lisbon where relatively few foreigners live or even visit, and it's an amazing, amazing country. But those aren't necessarily gonna be to everyone's tastes, they're not as universally appealing, convenient, or full of wow-factor architecture and restaurants. A city like Chaves is fucking wonderful to visit, but I don't necessarily need to live or work there.
Anyway, I dunno. America has never been the greatest country in the world contrary to all that exceptionalist nonsense. But it's also far from the pits contrary to the endless whining about it. Regardless of who's in power. I suppose it also depends on where you live, as NYC's meatgrinder often seems to operate via a different motor than the rest of the country's. But as someone who travels an awful lot, life seems just as hard or much worse in a sizable chunk of the world. And life being easier doesn't always translate as stimulating.
I do like Lisbon a ton, but I dunno if I could live there nowadays. I also adore Tokyo, but I doubt it would be much more accommodating than where I already reside (probably less). I've always thought Scandinavia was very sane and sensible, but MrsEaster finds it boring and homogenous, plus those countries don't exactly have open-door immigration policies for middle-class Americans or those not seeking "real" political asylum.